Pulse Films duo Fred & Nick have spent the last four months tearing up and down the UK as the directors behind T-Mobile's Superband campaign through Saatchi & Saatchi London. shot.net tracked down the twosome to find more about bringing their love for music to the commercials realm.

Where did you meet, and did you click creatively straight away?

We first met working within Channel 4's music output three or four years ago. In a sense we did click straight away - we both had the same influences and goals, we're pretty good foils for each other, we get on, share ideas really well, and have never struggled working creatively and in intense situations together - which over the last couple of years has served us really well.


You've worked mainly in music videos, how did you get into the industry? And what interests you about commercials?

Our link up with Pulse Films has been a huge help in the development of our work. Both of us started in television production, and whilst we learnt a lot we grew to dislike the constraints of it. We couldn't really see a future so we moved on by starting our own company and filming whatever we could for record labels. Being with Pulse, we've been lucky enough to work with some great artists in the past couple of years shooting documentary, live performance and video.

The opportunity to work in commercials kind of came out of our show reel being shown to Rick Dodds and Steve Howell at Saatchi and they gave us a call. It's the added challenge of commercials that interested us the most, taking someone else's creative ideas and bringing them to life, and hopefully exceeding expectations.


You're the directing team behind Saatchi's extensive Superband campaign for T-Mobile, tell us a bit about what you've been up to.

It's been an unbelievable four months - hard work, but rewarding. We are just finishing it up at the moment - it was a massive idea in terms of scope and risky for all of us as we essentially found this guy Josh whilst doing vox pops, then wound him up and let him go.

We've toured the country, played music in people's front rooms, on top of buses, in front of Edinburgh Castle, in an old people's home, behind a massive boat in the Trafford Centre to name a few. The process of how people have got involved has been amazing - to see hundreds of people who existed to us as either numbers or MySpace profiles become real people as the project developed, making their own way down to wherever we were, bringing their instruments, learning the song and sharing an experience, has been quite something. Which contributed massively to the big success of the campaign, which has been maintaining the authenticity of the project - the fact is people really have engaged with this project of their own accord.

Also, from our point of view a really great story developed where, at its core, the heart of the story through the last four months - which is impossible to get into the ads - has been one of the friendship that has emerged between four guys who it turns out were connected disparately in the past but, through the jam sessions at the start of this project, found their way to each other. Mikey (drums), George (vocals), Chris (keys) became the core band with which Josh surrounded himself as it became clear that he needed a band to help him teach the song and orchestrate whoever turned up on his tour.

They wrote the song together, and therefore they succeeded and achieved together - and in the end over 1,000 people came and played their song with them. Offer or no offer, brand or no brand, that's some achievement and wouldn't have happened had it not been for this project. And now they want to carry it on without T-Mobile cameras.


The campaign combines music, commercial and documentary - how has it compared to other projects you've worked on?

Through experience we feel we understand music and documentary pretty well - so quite obviously it's the commercial aspect that really defines this from our other work. However, essentially unless you're making a truly 'warts and all' piece on an established music artist you are usually promoting them and their product in some way - we guess the difference with the commercial campaign is that you are promoting a phone offer and not a new album. Either way our approach has remained the same - find what the story is and try to keep everything as authentic and honest as we possibly can. A lot of the Superband campaign exists away from the 30 second ads, there's a real story there. The ads just touch on the end result of something Josh and his band were trying to achieve.


Have you got any other jobs coming up that you can tell us about?

We've been doing lots of projects through Pulse Films, filming with Take That sporadically for the last nine months - which has resulted in a 60 minute tour documentary covering their Circus Live tour which is on air the weekend before Christmas; and a film of them performing at Abbey Road which has just come out on DVD in tandem with their Wembley gig. Hopefully we will continue our work with them in the future.

We are just about to travel to India for two weeks with Laura Marling and Mumford and Sons to shoot a music video for each of them out there. We're also shooting for the second instalment of our Gentlemen of the Road documentary film series with Mumford, as well as continuing to film with Laura working towards a feature documentary about her and her music, to hopefully come out at some point next year.


The end of the year is approaching fast - what are your hopes and plans for 2010?

We've really enjoyed the T-Mobile campaign and definitely would like to work again in commercials in the New Year - however, as it stands we're really excited about turning some of our continuing work in to feature documentaries to hopefully screen in festivals and with wider theatrical releases. Other than that - we're pretty open to ideas.

What have you been watching or listening to lately that you reckon shots.net readers should check out?

Pulse Film's documentary on Blur, No Distance Left To Run, that Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace have just made is out in Jan, and truly worth a watch.

And, early Bee Gees, anyone with an interest in music should get Spotify on and look up any of their 60s output.